Complicated Shadows

by Graham Thomson

  By his own admission, Baker had never heard of Elvis Costello, but when Elvis sounded him out at The Canteen, he quickly agreed to play for scale. ‘It was a cash deal,’ recalled Elvis. ‘He just came in; it may well have been the next day.’14 Elvis offered to double the jazzman’s standard union fee, and few could doubt he was worth every penny.

  ‘One of the best things we ever did was ‘Shipbuilding’,’ recalls Bruce Thomas, still moved by the experience many years on. ‘That was probably one of the musical high points. Chet Baker, this wizened corpse on death’s door, strung out, just played. He followed this bass line and played his solo, so simple, with so much soul in it. It really touched me. It was one of those things that really made me think about how you judge people.’

  While Langer concurs that Baker’s final contribution as heard on the record was inspirational, he remembers the session being a tough one. ‘We recorded the track live, but he kept blowing bum notes when we got to his solo. He was going, “This isn’t jazz!” so he couldn’t quite get it. That solo is three whole takes – the band as well – edited together, to get it to work. He was pretty spaced out.’

  * * *

  Elvis and The Attractions embarked on a short and rather hastily arranged tour of Ireland and England in June. During the album sessions, Elvis had found time to participate in a couple of shows at London’s Dominion Theatre in March as a guest of Madness, and a few days later had popped over to Sweden with The Attractions to showcase three new songs – ‘Invisible Man’, ‘Charm School’ and ‘Shipbuilding’ – on a TV show. But that was the sum total of his live work until the summer.

  The aim of the low-key tour was to play in the new material and get tight with the TKO Horns, who joined each gig midway through and held on until the end. It was a rather ragged affair, and most concerts were far from sold out. It ended on 28 June with an appearance at Dingwalls’ tenth birthday charity bash, where Elvis and The Attractions joined a stellar pub-rock line up which included Nick Lowe, Paul Carrack and a for-one-night-only reunion of Chilli Willi and The Red Hot Peppers, with Pete Thomas back behind the drum stool.

  Revisiting one of their earliest haunts, Elvis resisted the temptation to wallow in nostalgia, both on- and off-stage. ‘Oliver’s Army’ was the only pre-1980 song aired, and Ken Smith recalls a brief, cool meeting with his old Flip City friend. ‘I went up to him and he sort of said, “Hello mate”, and shook my hand, but that was it,’ he says. ‘I had a chat with Mary, but he wasn’t bothered.’

  Following the end of the tour, Elvis took the chance to add to the IMP repertoire. Having started the independent label because he couldn’t get ‘Pills And Soap’ out in desired time span through the regular channels, Elvis recognised an opportunity for releasing other interesting works that lacked an obvious mainstream outlet.

  Former Radiators From Space man and future Pogues guitarist Philip Chevron was working in Rock On in Camden, the same record store where Elvis had stocked up on his Stax and Motown records prior to recording Get Happy!! Elvis remained a regular customer, and as the two chatted one day Chevron outlined an idea he had for a version of ‘The Captains And The Kings’, from Brendan Behan’s play The Hostage. ‘Everybody I knew in the business were saying, “You can’t approach Elvis that way, you have to talk to Jake, you gotta go through the usual channels”,’ remembers Chevron. ‘I thought, “Fuck that, I’ll just ask the guy!”.’

  Elvis liked both Philip’s approach and his demo, and devised an ‘Elgar-meets-Palm Springs Orchestra’ arrangement of the song. Moving quickly before the US tour kicked off in early August, he and Chevron recorded the song at Jam Studios in north London, with Colin Fairley as engineer. ‘I loved his attitude in the studio, which was: nothing but the best,’ says Chevron. ‘He got in Dave Bedford [who had arranged strings on ‘Shipbuilding’] to orchestrate it, we got the best studio possible for the sound he wanted for the orchestra, and then like an old-fashioned independent label in America, we skimped on the B-side! It’s Elvis playing everything and me singing, and we did that in an hour including all his ad-hoc overdubs. That’s a great way to work.’

  ‘The Captains And The Kings’ was released on IMP in October and gained a little media attention and even a degree of airplay. It also cemented a friendship and working relationship between Elvis and Philip Chevron which would continue for a few years. From that point on, Chevron effectively became the de facto A&R man and sometime producer for the IMP label.

  * * *

  Punch The Clock was released in the first week of August. Elvis had been uneasy about the record even as he was making it, unsure whether he actually liked it or not. ‘He was a bit freaked out when we mixed it and he heard it back,’ admits Clive Langer. ‘“Fucking hell, what have we done? Created this pop album”.’ He had to go on Top Of The Pops and buy a Gucci jumper.’

  It was, of course, exactly what he had set out to do, but by the time of the album’s release, Elvis’s unease had grown into significant reservations. Punch The Clock became one of the few records that he publicly and categorically stated his dislike for: he bemoaned its lack of heart, its misplaced arrangements, acknowledging that it was not a record which was necessarily designed with longevity in mind. ‘A lot of the planning, the imaginary production of the record relates to pop music of the moment,’15 he conceded, as good as admitting it wouldn’t stand the test of time. Later, he would be more unforgiving, lambasting the ‘passionless fads of that charmless time: the early ’80s.’16

  Many of his criticisms held water. The record had a clear identity and a unified sound throughout, but it was thin and contrived. The Attractions were stripped of much of their personality, while Afrodiziak and the TKO Horns were filtered into the mix with very little subtlety. But it was not all down to the production. These were self-evidently not the greatest batch of songs Elvis had ever written. The rambling ‘King Of Thieves’, the insipid, forced jollity of ‘The World And His Wife’, and the worryingly high number of mediocre tunes jarringly welded onto their choruses (‘Love Went Mad’, ‘Mouth Almighty’, ‘TKO’) all lacked the craft and melody of the vast majority of Elvis’s previous output.

  It wasn’t all gloom, however. Aside from the peaks of ‘Shipbuilding’ and ‘Pills And Soap’, the slinky ‘Charm School’ retained its sultry slouch in the face of the unsympathetic production, while ‘Invisible Man’, ‘Let Them All Talk’ and ‘The Greatest Thing’ were all fine pop songs. And ‘Everyday I Write The Book’ was a fantastic song in any guise, perhaps the closest Elvis ever came to matching the witty word-play and universal melodic reach of Smokey Robinson. But even then, both the song’s initial live incarantion with a full-pelt Attractions, and its later acoustic transformation, outstripped the poppy recorded version.

  The reviews were generally strong, if a little cautious. The NME heard ‘a hit, but not quite a knockout’, before astutely wondering ‘whether Elvis hasn’t sacrificed a degree of emotional resonance in his bid for pop acceptability’. The New York Times praised the record for its ‘surprising textural contrasts that sound commercial but not cliched’.

  Having made a consciously populist record, Elvis made sure he was more accessible than ever before. An unprecedented amount of promotion was conducted for the new record in Europe and America. He gave over 100 interviews in total, and became a virtual fixture on radio and television. Throughout May, June and July, Elvis would pop out at unsuspecting viewers, finding his way on to everything from Top Of The Pops to BBC 1’s Breakfast Time, where he reviewed the morning papers with a typically acerbic eye.

  It all paid off. Despite its flaws, Punch The Clock achieved its goals. It arrested the commercial slump, attaining gold status on both sides of the Atlantic, becoming Elvis’s best-selling album since Get Happy!!. In addition, ‘Everyday I Write The Book’ gave him his biggest US single yet, climbing to No. 32 in the autumn of 1983. In America in particular, the accessibilty of Punch The Clock – coupled with the previous year’s round of polite, contrite
press interviews – finally laid the one-dimensional truculent persona of old to rest. In a country that positively revels in mea culpa and the subsequent happy ending, however contrived, Elvis was firmly back in the good books. Now his problems were to be found closer to home.

  Chapter Nine

  1983–86

  AS MARY COSTELLO APPEARED TO KNOW only too well, Elvis had never quite succeeded in extricating Bebe Buell from his mind – or his heart. ‘He had written me a couple of letters between 1979 and 1982, basically apologising for not “being able to promise me anything”, but that he wanted me to know that he loved me,’ claims Buell. ‘He left me dangling.’ In the summer of 1982, with his marriage in a familiar state of disarray, and with Mary already suspicious, Elvis sent Buell another letter, this time more romantically forthcoming. He probably felt that he might as well commit the crime he was being punished for. Buell was still very much in love with Elvis, and responded to his initial letter by bombarding him with notes sent to his office. ‘I completely forgot he was back with his wife and child,’ she said. ‘I acted as if he were mine and mine alone.’1

  However, it was a full year before they saw each other again. Contact via letter and telephone continued for some time, with Elvis torn between doing the right thing as a father and husband on the one hand, and surrendering to his desire and the avalanche of attention and affection from Bebe on the other. Physically, at least, he seemed resolved to keeping Buell at arm’s length, and the game of emotional cat-and-mouse continued for months until a four-hour telephone conversation in March 1983, when Elvis told her that he ‘needed’ to see her again. ‘It was all at his instigation,’ says Buell. ‘He was trying to resolve his feelings, revisiting me to see if there were any possibilities of a reconciliation. I don’t think he was strong enough to deny me. Of course, I played along. I adored him.’

  The meeting finally occurred in July in New York, where they had parted over four years earlier. Elvis was rehearsing for the US tour, as well as meeting with Yoko Ono to discuss cutting one of her songs, ‘Walking On Thin Ice’. As arranged, Buell came to his suite at the Parker Meridien Hotel, and within twenty-four hours they had reconsummated their affair. Before Elvis flew back to London, they made plans to meet up again during the ‘Clocking Across America’ tour the following month. It would eventually prove to be the knockout blow for his marriage.

  * * *

  The new live show leaned heavily on Get Happy!!, Imperial Bedroom and Punch The Clock, but the songs spanned the entirety of Elvis’s six-year recording career. He had put together a lengthy set which was more ambitious and more structured than anything he’d previously attempted. The equation was simple: there were more people on stage, thus less room for spontaneity. Afrodiziak hadn’t made the trip to the States, but the TKO Horns appeared on the opening six-song salvo, which on almost every night consisted of ‘Let Them All Talk’, ‘Possession’, ‘Watching The Detectives’, ‘Secondary Modern’, ‘The Greatest Thing’ and ‘Man Out Of Time’. They then departed, before returning for the climax of the show, usually ending in a combination of ‘Pump It Up’, ‘Alison’ and ‘I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down’.

  The horns added drama to some of the songs and gave them a solid, clearer outline, but Elvis experienced vocal problems throughout the tour. His singing voice was never the most pampered of instruments – indeed, The Attractions sometimes called him ‘The Barking Cabbage’ – and throughout the ‘Clocking Across America’ tour it often sounded forced or flat, and his words unclear. The rigours of being heard over a brass section – as well as the typically bruising Attractions – every night were taking their toll.

  There was no hiding place on 8 August, when Elvis took the unmissable opportunity to sing a duet with Tony Bennett as part of a television special in the Red Parrot club in New York. His voice was shot to pieces, and he only just survived the humiliation of croaking his way through ‘Lil’ Darlin’’ and ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing’ with the Count Basie Orchestra and the man Frank Sinatra regarded as the greatest singer of all time. ‘Mr Bennett was patient, sympathetic and paternal,’ Elvis recalled. ‘By the looks on their faces, the same could not be said for some of the saxophone section.’2

  The show at Columbia’s Merriweather Post Pavillion on 16 August found Elvis in better voice and in a congenial mood, something to do with the imminent arrival of Bebe Buell that night, perhaps. Geoffrey Himes of the Washington Post watched a twenty-nine song set ‘ranging broadly from whispered jazz reflections to punchy soul shouts’, and praised a performer who was ‘more generous, more subtle and more satisfying [than ever before]’. Towards the end of the tour, the recently composed ‘Great Unknown’ was thrown into the set, while the 22 September show at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre opened with a rare and welcome flash of crowd-pleasing nostalgia, six back-to-back surges of crackling electricity, played nowhere else on the tour: ‘Radio, Radio’, ‘Waiting For The End Of The World’, ‘Chelsea’, ‘This Year’s Girl’, ‘Miracle Man’ and ‘Lipstick Vogue’.

  Bebe and Elvis kept in touch after he and The Attractions flew home to resume touring in Europe and the UK at the end of September. Though there had been frequent telephone contact throughout the US tour, the couple had met only twice. Bebe hadn’t been the only woman Elvis had slept with in America, but the intensity of her feelings remained undiminished. Elvis, on the other hand, seemed to be trying to work out what exactly it was that he felt, in order to resolve old, unfinished business once and for all.

  Back in Britain, backing vocalists Afrodiziak were added to the mix on-stage, but the shows never strayed far from the US prototype. Many of the concerts were dogged by very poor sound, and Elvis’s voice remained patchy. Nonetheless, the shows were a hit with reviewers and audiences alike. Fans in Bristol on 29 October were treated to a rare ‘Big Tears’ and a thankfully even rarer stab at Gary Glitter’s ‘Leader Of The Gang’, while in Liverpool, Elvis received a standing ovation, led by his son Matthew. From there, the tour rumbled through Europe until the end of November, whereupon everyone – with one exception – took a break.

  Elvis spent most of the time up until Christmas writing songs for a new record. He moved an electric piano and a couple of guitars into a disused F-Beat office above a hairdresser’s salon in Acton, north London, and worked a business day, Brill Building-style. The relocation was an indication of deteriorating relations at home, but it was also Elvis’s attempt to apply more craft and focus to his writing, a reaction to Clive Langer’s disciplined approach and the retrospective belief that the songs on Punch The Clock were not as strong as they could or should have been.

  There was a reflective, narrative thread to the new songs, many of which Elvis demo-ed at Eden Studios in December. They included ‘The Great Unknown’, ‘Worthless Thing,’ and ‘Peace In Our Time’, a ballad first performed at The Big One, an anti-cruise missile benefit at the London Apollo on 18 December, where Elvis had ended his brief appearance by duetting with Paul Weller on a vamped version of The Style Council’s ‘My Ever Changing Moods’.

  By early February, Elvis had enough new material to be able to take The Attractions – shorn of both horns and harmonies – on a short tour of the south of France. Between 13 and 19 February, they road-tested nine of the thirteen songs that would end up on the next record. The gigs were loud, ragged and short, and it was neither a happy nor a particularly sober experience.

  ‘We were staying at this place in Cap de Ferrat where David Niven used to go,’ recalls Bruce Thomas. ‘I remember Pete Thomas lining up four brandies at one end of the pool and four brandies at the other. He drank one, swam to the other end, drank another, swam to the other end, drank another, swam to the other end. There was a different drink all the time.’

  This kind of behaviour was largely born of boredom and disaffection rather than hi-jinks. There had been a lot of tension on the Punch The Clock tour. The strain of having six extra people on the tour bus and on-stage didn’
t help, and when it got too much Elvis had occasionally pulled rank and bailed out, popping on a plane instead. Having already found themselves set up behind two backing vocalists and a horn section on stage, this wasn’t perhaps the best way to foster inter-band harmony amongst The Attractions.

  By the time they returned from France to record the new album, relations between Elvis and the band were on the contemptuous side of familiar. Elvis was full of doubt and unsure about the continuing validity of what they were doing musically; personally, he was at a severely low ebb, recognising that his affair with Bebe Buell had finally made his marriage irreconcilable.

  In a state of flux, and unbeknown to the band, he decided privately that his union with The Attractions had probably reached the end of the road. ‘He said to me on the sly, “I think this is going to be our last album”,’ recalls Clive Langer. With tar-black humour, it was to be called Goodbye Cruel World.

  Despite substantial artistic misgivings, the satisfying commercial returns of Punch The Clock had been sufficient for Elvis to allow Langer and Winstanley a second bite of the cherry. However, when they entered Sarm West Studios in London in early March, the relatively happy compromise between art and commerce which had proved partially successful on Punch The Clock quickly evaporated.

  Elvis believed many of the new songs were strong, and he had in mind a ragged, folk-rock sound. This, however, didn’t appeal to Langer and Winstanley, and artist and producers soon found themselves at loggerheads.

  ‘He would have been better off going back to Nick Lowe,’ says Clive Langer. ‘I wanted to carry on from where we had got to with ‘Everyday I Write The Book’, but Elvis was saying he wanted it really rough. I didn’t think it was his greatest bunch of songs, anyway, and we did say, “It would be great if you could write some more pop songs.” But he never did.’